Wes Kerr, Ryland Wheliss, Tucker Craig
Faculty Sponsor: Hammurabi Mendes
What the project will look like:
For our Database Systems final project, we are developing a method to store user queries to help students searching for classes at Davidson College. The question we want to answer is how should we represent such queries, and the catalog of courses in general, in a database for sorting, filtering, and matching by user preference? The end result will be a combination of a scraping tool, web interface, and database of user queries.
How adding classes currently works:
Normally, students are left to their own devices to find classes to take. Using davidson’s online catalog, they have to browse through lists of classes by department, mindful of their major requirements, ways of learning requirements, time conflicts, etc. Students, particularly after their first year, will develop preferences regarding what time their classes are (morning, afternoon, MWF, TR, etc.) and while users may consider this a constraint in choosing classes, there is no way to filter by this vertical at the moment.
Why are we doing this:
Building a database query system that users can use to build their ideal course load will expedite and automate an otherwise tedious chore. Given a list of students’ classes, and which of those they are willing to trade, we can also create a “matchmaking tool”, where a user inputs his or her preferences and classes, and can find potential students to swap classes with. This optimizes the amount of students that are receiving opportunities to take their preferred coursework while helping students build a schedule to work around other extracurricular conflicts throughout the day.